Speak-out In City Kicks Off Search For Solutions

200 Share Fears, Dreams For City

Speak-out Kicks Off Vision Project's Search For Solutions

November 07, 1992|By MIKE SWIFT; Courant Staff Writer

Ideas alone won't save a foundering city, but neither will a city be saved without good ideas.

With that belief in mind Friday evening, about 200 people walked into Hartford Public High School from the city's public housing, from downtown art galleries, from high school classrooms and goverment offices.

They came to the Hartford Vision Project's first "Community Speak-Out" to share their ideas for how to overcome the many problems that threaten Hartford's future.

Andrew McCrorey III talked about setting up a recording studio in the Bellevue Square housing complex in 1988, an effort he thought would give the young residents an alternative to empty hours and drugs.

"All I got was closed ears and excuses," the frustrated McCrorey said of the studio he no longer runs. Among the city's poorer residents, "there's a lot of energy, there's a lot of talent, and they never get a chance to share it," he said.

Down the hallway, a classroom full of teenagers debated whether a casino would be a good thing for Hartford's youth, and brainstormed about how to help young people. "We need a movie theater -- downtown," said Caitlin Plunkett of Hartford Public High School.

There were literally hundreds of other nuggets of experience shared about life in Hartford, and as many ideas for improving the city.

The Vision Project is intended to be one city's frank dialogue with itself, an honest look in the mirror to help an ailing patient decide what changes are necessary to achieve good health.

The 47-member Vision Project task force began work over a year ago, struggling toward an agenda for Hartford's future.

The task force was assembled to represent as many constituencies in the city as possible -- politics, business, the arts, nonprofit groups, schools, on the premise that the city and

region will support the agendaand work to make it reality, if a diverse enough group of people had a say in it.

Friday's "Speak-Out" was a milestone in the process, a chance to hear the community's hopes and frustrations before the task force begins the work of drawing up a set of recommendations for the city's future, due early next year.

Turnout Friday was not large, but those directing the vision project claimed success because of the group's diversity.

"I'm just delighted with the cross-section of people," said Frederick G. Adams, one of the co-chairmen of the Vision Project's steering committee. "These people would not have come out if they thought this was a bunch of pie-in-the-sky stuff."

Parts of the speak-out were dominated by warm emotions. "This speak-out today is really about building a community," Howard Rifkin, another steering committee co-chairman, told the group at the start of the evening. "It's about working together, it's about realizing that the diversity in Hartford is really our strength."

Later, the assembly broke into discussion groups, talking about specific problems and solutions to issues such as safety and crime, youth problems, education, health and culture and entertainment.

Some identified top problems in Hartford. For the education group, the topic was how to increase parental involvement and decision-making in the schools. For the health group, the top issues were access to health care, HIV infection and poverty and infant mortality.

The task force will use the ideas as raw information -- along with 1,500 questionnaires the project circulated last year.

The hope is that the Vision Project has been inclusive enough that a community groundswell will form behind the recommendations, forcing politicians, corporations and educators to make the vision reality